Posts Tagged ‘Confluence 3.5’

Our marketing team have been using Typepad, so they want a platform that is just as easy to use. But we also need a tool that can integrate with our Umbraco/Confluence site and one that can use our existing security.

Someone else on the team is looking at Umbraco, but I thought I’d share what I learned about blogging in Confluence.

1. Blog posts can be published from any space

Blog posts can be created from any space in your Confluence site with the right permissions. You can allow individual users, or groups of users, permission to create posts, and you can give some users permission to comment, and others permission to just view posts.

In our case, to start with, we want a single user to post updates for all the divisions in our company. The easiest way to do this it seems, is to set up a separate space for the blog.

2. Adding a blog post

Adding a blog post is just as simple as you’d expect. Simply browse to the appropriate space, click Add, and then Blog Post. Give the post a title, type in your entry, and click Save, just like you would for a Confluence page.

3. Displaying blogposts

To display blog posts, use the Blog Posts macro. You can restrict the posts displayed by label, author, time frame, and space, and you can sort the order that the posts appear. You can also choose whether to show just the title, or the title and an excerpt.

4. Moderating comments

There is no built-in way to moderate comments in Confluence 3.5, but you can install a beta plug-in (Confluence Comment Moderation). I installed the plugin, and once I’d found the Comment Moderation settings in the Space Admin panel, it worked for me.

One thing I’m still searching for, is a method for automatically pushing Confluence blog posts to Twitter and Facebook. Has anyone found a way to do this?

I received a question this month, asking how to link from JIRA to a Confluence page. I’ve been thinking about doing exactly this, so that we can keep Specification documents in Confluence, and then link to them from a JIRA issue. Here’s what I found.

Looking through the Atlassian documentation, I discovered a plugin called the JIRA Linker, which lets you create a custom field and a Search button, so that you can search for a Confluence page and link to it.

[Confluence 3.5, JIRA 4.3]

1. Download and install the JIRA Linker plugin

In JIRA, from the Dashboard, click Administration.

Select JIRA Administration.

Click Plugins.

Click Install, and then search for “JIRA Linker”. (For some reason the Search didn’t work for me, but once I showed all available plugins, I could scroll through the list and find the JIRA Linker plugin.)

At the moment I have a Confluence wiki installed on my desktop. Next we want to install Confluence on a server to test the integration of the wiki with our Umbraco website and LDAP security.

So that we can demo Confluence to others in the group quickly, I need to copy a Space from my local instance of Confluence into the new instance on the server. I’ve searched the Confluence documentation, and it looks like I need to export the space as a zipped XML archive, and then import the xml archive into the new instance. Let’s see how this works.

Before you begin, make sure you have Export Space permissions. Since I’m the administrator of this test Confluence instance, I have full access.

1. Export a space from one Confluence instance

In Confluence, navigate to the space you want to export.

Click Browse, then select Advanced.

Click XML Export.

Select All pages to export.

If you want to include comments or attachments, select the appropriate check boxes.

Click Export.
A progress bar shows you the progress of the export.

When the export is complete, click the link for Download here.
(It’s a very small link, so be careful you don’t miss it. I’d suggest to the Confluence team that it should be much more prominent, perhaps even a button.)

Save the zip file somewhere you’ll be able to find it.

2. Import the space into the new Confluence instance

In Confluence, from the Dashboard, click Browse, then select Confluence Admin.

In the Administration section, click Backup & Restore.

Choose a method for importing the space: upload a zipped backup, or restore a backup from a file system.
Since I want to import a space from another instance, I’ll select the first method.

Click Browse, locate the exported zip file, then click Open.

Click Upload and restore.
A progress bar shows you the progress of the import.

Since my space was just a few pages, there were no problems, and the whole process took just a few minutes. With a large space I imagine this might take a lot longer.

The Confluence documentation has lots of warnings about not copying a space over another space (if you try to import a space that already exists in a Confluence instance). This made me a bit nervous, but when I tried to do this very thing, Confluence warned me that a space existed with the same key, thus saving me from overwriting my files. I think if I was going to do this in a development environment, I’d want to test it several times in a test environment first, to be sure I didn’t overwrite anything unintentionally.

The main thing to watch for seems to be the space key. When you export a space, it copies everything from the space, including the space key. If you want to copy a space and import it into the same Confluence instance, you should use the Copy feature, and give your new space a different space key.